One of the ways the clothing industry seeks to be profitable is by mass-producing garments in only a few sizes. T-shirts, for example, usually are available in small, medium and large sizes. One-size-fits-all is a familiar sizing option for some garments as well.
Even where ten or more garment sizes are offered for sale, many customers seem not to fit into any of the available sizes. Consider, for example, a customer with a large waist and thin legs. Since the waist size is large, the customer is more likely to regularly find pants that are too loose on the legs or too tight in the waist. Also, the customer may find pants that will fit, but may not prefer the pants design.
Some changes are evident in the clothing industry. Some garment stores, for example, offer pants in many different styles, hoping to fit a larger percentage of customers. Still, the almost infinite variety of body sizes and fit preferences frustrate the ability to satisfy all customers.
Some garment manufacturers offer custom-fitting facilities, in which a customer either visits a sizing location or submits size data to the facility. For on-site service, a variety of sizing methods can be employed, from computer-directed body scanning techniques to the use of a tape measure. Once the body contour of the customer is established, a customer-specific garment can be produced.
Unlike mass manufactured garments, where textures are piled and pattern pieces (i.e., designed texture pieces) are cut out in mass, custom-made garments require each pattern piece to be cut out to a unique design. That unique design incorporates the size, shape and preferences of the customer for whom the garment is being made. Currently, these custom-made pattern pieces are often cut manually, piece by piece, and pattern pieces and garments (i.e., connected pattern pieces) are mostly inspected by manual means, or visual human inspection.
As with all manual, human manufacturing processes, the manual cutting and visual inspection process in the custom-made garments industry is tedious and time consuming, and marginally reliable at best. This unreliability is because the pattern pieces and garments at the manual visual inspection process require varying human judgment, even for similar quality standards. Further, unlike the inspection of mass-produced clothing where inspections are made against a static design, custom-made clothing are inspected against unique designs. This constantly changing unique design inspection frustrates the speed and accuracy with which the manual visual inspection process can be accomplished for custom-made clothing.
Some manufacturers have attempted to speed up pattern piece garment inspection. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,664,512 (“the 512 patent”) describes a vision and control system that produces an X-axis and Y-axis accept/reject reference, where the two axes are based on a corner point in the pattern piece and cut lines extending from the corner point in a 90 degrees cut angle. However, if a cut pattern piece does not have a corner point (e.g., a rounded pocket piece for pants, a hat piece, etc.), reference point cannot be located and inspection using X-Y axes cannot be conducted. Moreover, even if the pattern piece were to have a corner point, for many, if not most, pattern pieces (e.g., like sleeves, tapered pants legs, etc.), cut lines do not extend from the corner point in a 90 degrees angle, making formation of the reference X-Y axes using cut lines less possible.
A further drawback of using X-Y reference axes defined by a corner point with a 90 degrees cut angle is that inspection error will more likely be induced by this method. For example, consider a pattern piece that is shaped as shown in FIG. 14, having one 90 degrees cut corner and straight cut lines on the upper right position. During the cutting process, the 90 degrees corner has been mistakenly cut in a slightly skewed manner, but maintaining the 90 degrees corner and the straight cut lines. The pattern piece as a whole is within the design tolerance, but when X-Y axes are created from this corner point and inspected using the methodology of the '512 patent, the further away from the reference corner point, the more gap will result between the actual pattern piece position and the expected position, inducing an inspection error. This error-induction at inspection will hinder the production process and greatly increase the cost of the finished garment.
Because of the slow, tedious and inaccurate manual visual inspection process involved in the production of custom-made garments, custom-made garments tend to take longer to produce, which is one of reasons why they are more expensive than similar mass produced garments. Thus, for custom-made garments to more effectively compete with mass produced garments, the time to produce, which is driven by the time and accuracy to inspect must be reduced.
What is needed, then, in the custom-made garment industry is an improved method of inspecting custom-made pattern pieces and garments with precision and speed.